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Monday, 20 October 2025

The Great HSC heist of 1985, 2.

 

The narrator as a disabled number-cruncher

Teacher training threw me briefly into the hands of Don Spearritt, who fascinated me with his statistical approach to testing and measurement. As I had always been terrified by exams and tests, and having picked up a year of psychology (in all, I took 10 first-year subjects, probably a record), I thought it would be good if the kids being examined had a friend “at court”.

In the time of being sent to my room “to study”, my friend the librarian had introduced me to William Saroyan’s Sam, The Highest Jumper of Them All, a surrealist play which gave me the notion of ‘the ambassador from the audience’, and that was the role I coveted.

By the end of my first year of teaching, I was known as a TV quiz star, thanks in large part to my fascination with backgrounds to things, trivia mainly. The slack of mind said, “You’re Peter from Pick-a-Box: you must be really intelligent”, whereas no intelligence was involved at all: it was just pack-rattery. Anybody who called me a polymath was told the word they were seeking was polymoth.

Having put in two years in the classroom, I was hijacked into a senior examination role, and it was only later that I realised a complete idiot of a Chief Inspector whom I had met while he was carrying out a cover-up, had nominated me because of the quiz show experience.

Still, my now-dead father’s friends had picked up through gossip that I had a certain command of the language and a ready facility for cutting through tripe. So who were his friends? They were inhabiting the world I was just about to enter.

You see, my father had also been in the education department, and a B.A. in Latin and philosophy, he was an official who worked in the clerical division at a time when admin and clerical was entirely separated from professional, but having been a wartime Squadron Leader (where he gained the PTSD), he returned to find that a leech had taken his job. He took the leech (a gutless wonder who dared not risk his skin in war) to a tribunal, and had him tossed out, so that he could return to his post.

The leech slunk off, and by guile and malevolence, rose in the clerical division, but my father, having a degree, was later elevated to the professional division, and saw the leech no more. He was a shining beacon, a hero to the ‘admin and clerical’ side, because he had broken through the ceiling. Remember the leech, though, because he will return.

In 1972, I decided to engage in a master’s degree in educational measurement, but by that time, I already had a reputation as an analyst who could cut through the nonsense.

The first attempt to get me into “Head Office” was banjaxed by a nasty idiot of a school inspector, the chair of the science syllabus committee who had come up with a bizarre and stupid scheme to assess “attitude to science”, giving it a 30% loading (he thought), but because of the way he planned to apply it, that 30% loading would distort the ranking. A member of the syllabus committee asked me, and I wrote a three-page technical report, which was then tabled, with my name attached, everybody agreed that I was right, and the idea was wrong. The result: Alan Watson blackballed me, and it took a couple of years before he was ordered to back down.

I had not picked a fight with him: I had simply provided an informed technical analysis, and it was a decade before I buried the hatchet (in his head), but that story is surplus to requirements. Those master classes with Jack Lang eventually paid off

After 1976, I was toiling away as an Education Officer, generating item banks, fast and furious, across a range of subjects, including Needlework, Home Science, Agriculture and languages, so a few years later, I was poached into TAFE, Technical And Further Education, to develop methods for item banks in plumbing and mechanical engineering.

Part of my interview was a Dorothy-Dixer, a formulaic question about averaging, to which I replied that I could return all sorts of average to order. In the data set 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 10, I said, the mode is 1, the median is 2, and the mean is 3, but each of these values could be called the average. This to me was normal fare, but the selection panel were delighted, except for the questioner, who grinned: as he told me later, he had heard me saying exactly this in a seminar, so I gained a reputation as a numbers person, and indeed I was.

Not long after, the same man passed to me a fraudulent proposal from the Control Data Corporation, and I enthusiastically worked through their amateurish ‘evaluation’ of a stupid idea, and sank it for four different government departments, saving them something like 12 times my annual salary as a Senior Education Officer. You can read the details here: https://oldblockwriter.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-selling-of-plato.html

Then, with my reputation as a whizz with numbers, I was called on to assist in a survey of the needs of and provisions for what we were about to stop calling “the handicapped”, who were now given a politer name, disabled. And that brought me to the case of the One-armed Sculptress.

This lady wanted to get an Art Certificate, but a compulsory component was operating a single-lens reflex (SLR) camera. That required two hands, and while she could sculpt with one hand, the camera requirement was beyond her, and a nasty gnome called Eddy, a mirror-image of the leech, a Grade-12 clerk, was rigid in his demand that she comply with the regulations. In other words, I saw him as cruising for a bruising, meat for my mincer.

I was asked to intervene, and several nice professional people who knew Eddy’s tricks briefed me on his ploys. I beat him hands-down, or as I put it later, I won the Battle of the One-armed Sculptress. Mixing with the disabled, I began to acquire their attitudes, so when I was sent in to brief a board on what we had learned, a stupid political appointee simpered that it was a pity we did not have “somebody handicapped” doing my task.

I replied that we now called them disabled, not handicapped, we were dealing with eighteen types of disability, and that I, in fact, had three non-manifest disabilities. “I have been working with the wheelies, and they don’t hold back. They would say that you want a cripple in a wheelchair that you could patronise.” She took this on the chin as I continued: “If a wheelie did my job, they would know nothing of my disabilities, any more than I did of theirs, but we talk to each other.”

She did not dare ask what my disabilities were, which was lucky, because I would have to say that I was a colour-blind, slightly short-sighted technical dwarf (my long bones are all shorter by two standard deviations). When a Chief’s position became available back in education (though it was now a “Senior Education Officer, Class 2”), I applied for it and returned to the schools side of education.

I was now close to the realm of politics. I kept my own affiliations hidden, and served faithfully, offering honest advice, even when it failed to fit the preconceptions of a minister.

There is more to this story:

The Great HSC heist of 1985, 1. Prologue.

The GreatHSC heist of 1985, 3. Applied anarchy and surrealism.

The GreatHSC heist of 1985, 4. The robbery.

The GreatHSC heist of 1985, 5. The repair job.

The GreatHSC heist of 1985, 6. The hysterical woman.


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